“Fight, fight for your life. Life is a gift.“​This is the advice of long-time community activist, poet, and 21 year breast cancer survivor, Fay Chiang.

Fay's survival instincts were honed in her twenties when she lived in Queens and ran her family's hand laundry business at night and was the executive director of Basement Workshop by day while she attended art classes at Hunter College and juggled the care of her father with terminal colon cancer and her brother with Hodgkin's disease.

Each time her cancer relapses, Fay's outlook is "I will survive this. I've got too much to do!" For the past 22 years, Fay has not only been fighting for her life, but for the causes she believes in by working with young people at risk; people living with HIV/AIDS; and working with parents whose family members have been killed by the police. And, as a poet, visual artist and cultural activist, Fay believes that culture is our psychological weapon that empowers us to recall our past, live fully in the present and to dream of what is possible for the future. Fay's spirit speaks in her poem, "Landmarks and Geography."